Compare with Leopard (OS 10.5) Before You Buy - davidnie

Leopard includes one new voice, Alex. This is a male American voice. For high quality female voices, child voices and voices for other languages you still need third party solutions. By the way, GhostReader also works fine with Apple's new Alex.

David Niemeijer
AssistiveWare/ConvenienceWare

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Monday, November 05 2007 @ 02:15 AM PST

Leopard Text-To-Speech is sort of a downgrade - zunipus

"Does Leopard have Improved Text-Speaking? YES "

And NO! The new speech engine was optimized to run the Alex voice. If you check in the Leopard system you'll find that the Alex file is MASSIVE! Is Alex an improvement over previous voices? Well, sort of. To be honest, the best voice Apple ever made was Vicki. She reads to me all the time in Tiger. Listen to Vicki in Leopard: She's ruined. Here voice modulation is out of control and she sounds like she's on coke or something with huge rises and falls in her speech. And you can't fix her. Even if you find an application like Tex-Edit Plus that can control voice modulation, she still sounds out of her mind.

I am therefore SEVERELY disappointed with the Text-To-Speech in Leopard. I use Alex, but he still goes 'clunkity clunk' in his speech patterns, just like the mediocre voices you can buy elsewhere.

There are some better voices you can buy these days. But BE SURE TO TEST THEM before you buy them! Many of them inexplicably have no idea how to change their voice inflection with !Exclamation Marks! or ?Question Marks? That, for my money, is a deal breaker. I don't buy defective voices.

BTW: I have had friends complain about Bruce, Victoria and Vicki, saying they can't understand them. Apparently I am special. I have never had any trouble understanding them. Various versions of MOSX Text-To-Speech have inflicted various bugs into their speech, such as the Bruce farting noise every now and then. But I have to give Apple huge kudos for providing us with excellent text-to-speech since PlainTalk was released back in the Mac OS 7.5 days.

Take a listen to Windows text-to-speech some time. Listen to the computer voice Dr. Steven Hawking uses. Pink Floyd recorded him speaking in their song "Keep Talking". It's outright horrible and often incomprehensible. A pity. Get a Mac Dr. Hawking!

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Thursday, April 16 2009 @ 10:15 AM PDT